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A Right Master Criminal This One!
Posted: Fri Mar 25, 2016 3:51 am
by dales
Man Arrested in North Carolina for Allegedly Failing to Return VHS Tape Rented in 2001
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A man has been arrested in North Carolina for allegedly failing to return a VHS tape he'd rented nearly 15 years ago, PEOPLE confirms.
On Tuesday, James Meyers, 37, was pulled over by police as he was taking his daughter to school, according to court documents. Officers ran his license and learned an active warrant had been issued for Meyers's arrest.
After dropping off his daughter, Meyers turned himself in to police and was booked on a single charge: failure to return rented property.
In late 2001, Meyers allegedly rented a copy of the universally panned Tom Green film Freddy Got Fingered. Since it was released, the movie – about a struggling cartoonist who is forced to move back in with his parents – has attained cult film status.
Meyers is scheduled to appear in court on April 27 to answer to the charge, and faces a possible $200 fine if convicted.
The warrant was issued years ago, police tell PEOPLE, and remained active even after the rental store shuttered its doors.
Green, a stand-up comedian on a tour of Australia, learned of Meyers' arrest, and took to Twitter to say he was "struggling to believe it is real."
In a video posted to YouTube, Meyers says he can't believe he was arrested for allegedly not returning a video to a defunct business and expressed his opinion that the police had better things to do with their time.
Re: A Right Master Criminal This One!
Posted: Fri Mar 25, 2016 4:02 am
by Scooter
No attempt was made to serve the warrant on him in 15 years? Doesn't statute of limitations kick in at some point if police can't be bothered to pursue a case against him for that long?
Re: A Right Master Criminal This One!
Posted: Thu Mar 31, 2016 1:43 pm
by BoSoxGal
Like everything else it's certainly dependent on state statute, but in my experience in the jurisdictions where I've practiced, no, warrants do not die because of lack of service. My prosecutor office in Montana had a warrants open drawer packed full with warrants as old as 30 years; if somebody has moved and there is no known address at which to locate them, they don't get served until they get pulled over for a traffic infraction or arrested on some new criminal charge. The FBI recently coordinated a bunch of arrests on folks with warrants outstanding for several years, some for very serious violent crimes. The warrant is the preservation of the statute of limitations; it shows that the State is preserving its right to prosecute and trying to bring the alleged offender to court for her Constitutional right to a hearing or trial by jury.
Now will the prosecutor actually pursue this case? She shouldn't, and under best case scenario, her office would have in place a procedure to regularly (at least annually) cull the stupid cases from the open warrants file. This is one that I would have asked the court to dismiss and closed the file, unless the guy had a long-standing criminal history of like offenses, i.e., stealing property from video stores by failure to return videos. Cases like this make police and prosecutors look stupid, which is why prosecutors have an obligation to keep on top of their open cases/outstanding warrants files and weed out ones that aren't serving the interests of justice.